6 Ways Students Can Use Sketchnotes to Aid Studying

 

Rachel Burnham writes: In this article, I want to share some of my experiences of how students can make use of Sketchnoting to aid them in their studying.

Sketchnotes are rich pictures, which you create yourself, that make use of a combination of both words and simple pictures.  There are many styles and approaches to Sketchnoting – in Sketchnoting there are no rules, it is about finding an approach that works for you.  For example, I like to make use of colour in my Sketchnotes, whereas Mike Rhode, who came up with the term Sketchnote in 2007, creates fabulous sketchnotes just using black ink.  Some people create Sketchnotes using a tablet & software, whereas I prefer paper and pens.

I have been using Sketchnoting for about 6 years and have introduced many people to Sketchnoting to aid their work, thinking and learning. I have worked with Learning & Development and HR professionals, engineers, digital marketeers, coaches, forensic scientists, geographers, university lecturers and many others including school and university students.  From this experience I have become convinced of the value of Sketchnoting to anyone who is studying, whether at school, college, university or for a professional qualification. 

Sketchnoting is a flexible tool that can help you to be more effective in the way you study.  It can be used to create memorable notes; to aid you in making sense of what you are learning; for planning your work including assignments; for reflection; when revising; and when communicating your ideas to others.  In addition, many people with dyslexia seem to find Sketchnoting a helpful approach to making notes.

One thing that concerns many people when they first hear about Sketchnoting, is the fear that you need to be good at art to be able to use Sketchnoting.  Fortunately, you don’t need to be able to draw to start Sketchnoting, as the drawings used are very simple indeed, which can be picked up quickly with a little practise and an open mind. 

In this blog, I want to explore practically how Sketchnoting can be used to aid learning.  As I do this, I will make links to the concept of ‘dual coding’ which is a well-researched approach to learning which has been extensively studied in cognitive psychology.  Dual coding essentially identifies that information which is presented with words and pictures is coded by the brain in two different but linked ways.  This means when you make notes using a combination of words and visuals, your brain creates linked memories, which you have a much better chance of recalling.   The power of ‘dual-coding’ is at the heart of what makes Sketchnoting effective.

Here are the 6 ways you can use Sketchnoting to help you study:

 

1.  Note-making

Sketchnoting can be used both for making notes of lectures and discussions, but also to summarise material studied through reading, watching videos or listening to recordings.   Sketchnotes enable you to make personal notes, that focus on the key points from the session, lecture or reading.  When making notes in a class or lecture it is awfully tempting to try and write everything down, but the very effort of trying to record everything, can mean that you almost stop thinking about what you are writing in the effort to capture it all. When Sketchnoting a lecture, talk or class, it is impossible to record everything, yet this apparent weakness, is one of the strengths of Sketchnoting. If you are Sketchnoting you do not attempt to record everything, just the key points, but because you are actively choosing which points to capture and which words & images to use, you stay focused and engaged.  When looking back at your notes, your memory is then triggered to recall additional detail not directly captured in your Sketchnote.  To get the full benefit of this, it is helpful to look back over your notes and actively seek to recall the full information.  If you do this, say the day after creating your notes, you will also gain the benefits of retrieval practice, which I will discuss in more detail when looking at revising.

You can also use Sketchnoting to summarise information gained from reading books & articles or from watching videos or listening to recordings.  Once again, the benefit of Sketchnoting over other forms of notetaking, is that it requires you to think through and actively identify which are the key points to record. 

  

2.  Connecting ideas and thinking things through

Often when studying a subject it helps to think about how the different aspects of that topic link together to deepen and broaden your understanding. You can use Sketchnoting to help you do this, by creating a Sketchnote that shows the connections between the topics.  If you are researching a topic, you can use a Sketchnote to show the relationships between the information you have gathered. 

 For example, I was researching with a colleague the ways that virtual reality (VR) could be used to facilitate training in the workplace – we talked to experts, read articles and tried out different VR applications ourselves.  We realized that one way of making sense of all the different ways of using VR was to consider how much the different VR apps immersed learners and so we arranged all the uses we had come across along a rating scale of the degree of learner immersion and I drew the following Sketchnote to illustrate this. 

Leonardo Da Vinci, who was not only an amazing artist but interested in a wide range of scientific subjects, used to carry out ‘thought-experiments’ in which he regularly sketched out pictures illustrating ideas he was exploring such as wave patterns, light & the moon, river eddies and added notes alongside them.  Effectively he was Sketchnoting! Some of his notebooks still exist today and so you can see how he did this.  

 

3.  Planning

Sketchnotes can be used very flexibly to aid you plan all kinds of work tasks including assignments, presentations and projects.  When using Sketchnoting for planning, I often create much messier and more unfinished looking Sketchnotes than for other purposes – I rarely keep them beyond the need for the immediate task.  Here is an example of a Sketchnote I created when preparing a presentation on Networking:

One of the advantages of using Sketchnotes for planning is that you can begin with whatever ideas first come to mind and you can then go back and decide the order in which you tackle the tasks or the order in which the sections go.  In this respect, Sketchnoting has some similarities to MindMapping, though there are many more options about how you lay out your Sketchnote.

 

4.  Reflecting

Many courses encourage you to carry out reflection during your time of study, perhaps as preparation for using reflection as part of continuing professional development (CPD) in a work role. It may even be an integral part of the whole course or a requirement within one or more assignments to carry out a reflection.  The idea behind reflection is to take time to learn from experiences (whether those experiences involve doing an assignment, carrying out a task, doing some research or from a life experience) by identifying  what went well and why, what could be improved and what you will do to be even more effective in the future.  This process of reflection may make use of a model such as Gibbs' reflective cycle (1988).

Reflection can be done and recorded in many ways, in the form of a journal, a blog, through a video recording, through a professional discussion with an assessor.  Sketchnoting can also be used to record your reflections.   Some people find that this is an alternative approach that works for them in a way that other methods don’t.  Others have commented that it allows them to slow down and reflect more deeply and for this reason they find it more effective.

   

5.  Revising

One of the powerful lessons from cognitive psychology is how to revise effectively. Often when revising people use the approach of reading and rereading their notes.  Many experiments have shown that it is more effective to use an approach called ‘retrieval practice’, in which you study a topic and then return to it and rather than study the same material again, instead actively try to bring the material back to mind – this could be through questions posed by a tutor or teacher or fellow student or jotting down what you remember from the topic or you could create a Sketchnote of what you recall.   Once you have done this you can then check back against the original study material, to check for any errors and also fill in any gaps.   This method of revising is highly effective even if you find that you struggle to recall much material at first.  But when you return to it again, you will have reinforced the links to the correct and full information far more effectively through that process of struggle.

If you allow some time to elapse between revisiting the material in this way, you will also tap into the benefits of ‘spaced practice’, another well evidenced learning practice from cognitive psychological research. If you are interested in finding out more about ‘dual coding’, ‘retrieval practice’ and ‘spaced practice’ it is worth checking out The Learning Scientists Podcast for easy to understand explanations and examples.

 

6.  Communicating your ideas

Finally, Sketchnotes can be used as a way of presenting your ideas, perhaps within a seminar or session or even in an assessment.  Some courses make use for example, of academic posters for presenting ideas and Sketchnoting would be an excellent way of producing one. 
 
These 6 ways of using Sketchnoting all come from experience and make use of what we know is effective in learning.  They are all practical ways of adding to your study skills and enabling your study experience to be both effective and enjoyable. If you think that Sketchnoting could help you with your studying this year, why not learn to Sketchnote?

 

Rachel Burnham

2 September 2020

I help individuals and organisations to work and learn more effectively, particularly though using the tools of Sketchnoting and the curation of resources.  I make use of Sketchnoting to introduce people to using visuals to aid thinking, working and learning.  I help people to manage for themselves the information they need to stay up-to-date in their professional work.

Sketchnoting: 5 Benefits for Learning

Rachel Burnham writes: This week I have been reflecting on what the benefits are of Sketchnoting for learning.   Sketchnoting combines simple pictures, graphics, text and layout.  I also make use of colour, but some Sketchnoters just use black ink very effectively.  There are no rules in Sketchnoting.  You create a style and approach that works for you. 

Here are 5 areas where I think Sketchnoting can be a useful tool.

1. Note taking

This is the main way I use Sketchnoting, both for taking notes live from presentations and also to summarise podcasts, books and articles.  Some people may find that Sketchnoting works better for them as a way of making notes, than traditional note taking.  I always struggled a bit with note taking because I write very slowly and find spelling a bit of a challenge.  My notes always looked very chaotic.  Sketchnoting encourages you to focus on listening for meaning and key points, rather than attempting to capture everything.   With Sketchnoting, you create notes that work for you.  There is anecdotal evidence of this making a difference for some learners.

Example of Sketchhnote recorded live

Creating notes using Sketchnoting can aid recall.  It makes use of dual coding – the use of both visuals and words to capture ideas and because both are used there are two potential memory triggers. This is different to the idea of learning styles and the notion that someone has a visual learning style, which has little evidence to support it.   There is a very good exploration of dual coding and how this differs from learning styles in Episodes 12 and 13 of ‘The Learning Scientists Podcast’. 

    2. Planning

You can also use Sketchnoting for planning.  This can be helpful when planning to write an assessment, report or article or when planning a project or presentation.   I used to use Mind Maps for this, but I find Sketchnotes are more flexible.  

When I use Sketchnotes for planning, they often look much more ragged and unfinished than my other Sketchnotes, as I keep adding notes to them and often create them much more quickly than my other Sketchnotes.  I often don’t keep these Sketchnotes as they are just part of the process.  

Here is an example of a Sketchnote I used to help me prepare for a presentation I was delivering at the AGM for CIPD Manchester.  

    3.  Retrieval Practice

Sketchnotes can be a useful tool in retrieval practice – that process of actively revisiting and rehearsing material previously learnt, as part of the process of committing it to memory.   For example, you could create a Sketchnote from memory of material previously studied.   This active process of recalling material is much more powerful as a study technique than simple rereading your notes or learning materials over and over. For further information on the effectiveness of retrieval practice, let me again recommend you to the excellent ‘The Learning Scientists Podcast’ this time to Episode 2.

In Learning & Development, I want to emphasise that this technique is only valuable if employees really need this knowledge to perform better.  Often we have thrown knowledge at employees, when actually the issue isn’t a lack of knowledge, but perhaps more an issue of skill or even some other factor in the workplace.   So first we need to make sure that we have properly diagnosed what will make a real difference to workplace performance.  

Even if it there is a knowledge-component, we also need to carefully distinguish whether learners really need to learn this knowledge, so that it is internalised or is it more effective for them to be able to find it when they need it.   It is difficult and takes time & effort to really get knowledge embedded within us, plus much information that is needed for performance in the workplace changes rapidly, so it makes sense to only do this where this is absolutely essential.    And there are times when it is essential that a learner has that material always to hand – but this is far less than we have traditionally assumed. 

So with those caveats, Sketchnoting can be a tool to for use in retrieval practice.   For example, on as part of a longer programme, whether face to face or online, you could encourage learners to create a Sketchnote of key points explored at an earlier point in a programme and thus also bring in an element of spaced practice.

    4. Reflection

You can also create a Sketchnote as part of the process of reflecting on learning, whether that learning is part of a formal programme or has come from experience.   Reflection goes deeper than the recounting of information and facts that might be found within a Sketchnote created for retrieval practice, to include feelings, impact, application, implications for the future and so on.   You could encourage reflection using one of the many reflective practice models, but capture it in the form of a Sketchnote.  

In my experience, some learners like writing reflections, but some find the writing a challenge and prefer to video or capture reflections in a visual format.

    5.  Conceptualising

Sketchnotes can be a useful tool to think something through.  Many people find it useful to explore, through using pictures and diagrams, the relationships between information or ideas and Sketchnotes can be a vehicle for doing this. 

As with planning, the end result may be less finished, more back of the envelope.

Here is an example of a Sketchnote that I created to pull together some of the findings from some informal research that my colleague Niall Gavin and I did into the uses of Virtual Reality (VR) for Learning and Development.  We read articles, talked to experts, tried out different examples of VR and reflected together on what we had learnt.  As a result of this I put together a Sketchnote showing examples of the uses of VR for learning in the workplace using the degree of immersion as a rating scale.  This Sketchnote is the final polished version, as I reworked it for use in an article – if I was just sense-making for myself, I wouldn’t include such finished pictures!

I hope that this review of these five uses of Sketchnoting gives you some ideas of how you can use Sketchnotes to support learning.  I would be really interested in your ideas and examples of how you can use Sketchnoting to support effective learning – do get in touch to share your thoughts.

Rachel Burnham

16/9/18

Burnham L & D works with individuals and organisations to help them learn and work more effectively.  As part of this I help L&D professionals to be even more effective through updating their skills and know-how.  I have a particular interest in curation and the use of digital technologies in learning.  I frequently Sketchnote at events and offer workshops in Sketchnoting.